Electronic Book Review - teletheoryhttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/teletheory
enFrom Mystorian to Curmudgeon: Skulking Toward Finitudehttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/nostalgic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Marcel O\&#039;Gorman</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2007-05-09</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="longQuotation">You will feel, if you transcribe the passage in this orderly fashion, that the rugged impetuosity of passion, once you make it smooth and equable by adding the copulatives, falls pointless and immediately loses all its fire. Just as the binding of the limbs of runners deprives them of their power of rapid motion, so also passion, when shackled by connecting links and other appendages, chafes at the restriction, for it loses the freedom of its advance and its rapid emission as though from an engine of war. (Longinus, “On The Sublime”, Chapter 21)</p>
<p class="longQuotation">HAMLET: To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?</p>
<p class="longQuotation">HORATIO: ‘Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so. (William Shakespeare, <span class="booktitle">Hamlet</span>, Act V, Scene 1)</p>
<h2>Curmudgeonly Self-Indulgence</h2>
<p>CURMUDGEON: [n] An avaricious, grasping fellow; a miser; a niggard; a churl. [OE. cornmudgin, where -mudgin is prob. from OF.; cf. OE. muchares skulking thieves.]</p>
<p>How did I get here? Only five years ago I was mystoricizing with Greg Ulmer in sunny Gainesville. Today, in gray, sludgy Detroit, I am asking students to write academic essays that explain away their experimental work in HTML and Flash. What’s worse, the course topic I have chosen this term is <span class="lightEmphasis">finitude</span>, human mortality. I am on the cusp of becoming radically un-hip, a curmudgeon. The curmudgeon side makes me say things like: ‘mystories are for navel-gazers.’ Indeed, that is the problem with assigning mystories to students during the winter months in Detroit. They use the genre - a discursive network (<span class="lightEmphasis">popcycle</span>) of pop culture, critical theory, history, and autobiography - to engage in auto-psychoanalysis. They get mired in their own subjectivity, and produce work that is no more innovative than the nostalgic, self-exploratory essays encouraged in freshman composition classes. The curmudgeon also says things like: ‘hypertext is dead.’ There’s that finitude again. Where does this comment come from? Maybe, in part, from the boredom I sense when clicking through the directionless infinity of hypertext fiction. And, in part, from the way writers use digital nonlinearity as a way of masking poor writing skills. And, in part, from being overwhelmed by too much information, most of it worthless. Whatever the case may be, I am nauseated by the sense of nostalgia I feel when I look at the cover of George P. Landow’s <span class="booktitle">Hypertext Theory</span>. Hypertext theory, too, is dead. Even critical theory itself has been liquidated into a series of menu items in Photoshop and Dreamweaver. What comes next?</p>
<p>In an attempt to exorcise the curmudgeon - or at least examine him - I’m going to take this opportunity to engage in a little self-indulgent navel-gazing myself. Maybe I can rescue or at least revisit the sense of pleasure that I felt while composing the various Ulmer-inspired mystories and other heuretic exercises that I completed over the past decade. Perhaps, as well, I might be able to discover how I went from mystorian to curmudgeon in such a short time. My goal, then, is admittedly hermeneutic, which, I’ll admit, is heresy for a heuretician. Recalling a passage in Ulmer’s <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span> (1989) (I will only recall Ulmer here, not quote him) I will begin by appropriating the mood of Hamlet as he pondered forensics at Yorrick’s grave. In sooth, I suppose there really is no appropriation here; as a scholar, I am always-already melancholic, always-already staring into the skull.</p>
<h2><a class="outbound" href="http://libarts.udmercy.edu/marcel/skulmer/skulmer.zip%20(DOS%20batch%20file)">A Skull Session with Gregory “Golgotha” Skulmer</a></h2>
<p>SKULLFISH: [n] a whaler’s name for a whale more than two years old.</p>
<p>The very first mystory I completed was an assignment in a critical theory class at Ottawa University, my first real course in theory, and the most difficult I have ever taken. The course was taught by a stern German, a specialist in Melville and Heidegger, who once told me that ‘no great philosophy ever came out of the south.’ And yet, he deigned to include <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span> (written by a Floridian) on the syllabus. Each student was required to select a text from the syllabus and give a seminar-style presentation. Admittedly, I was somewhat intimidated by older PhD students in the class, and reluctant to make a selection at all. I was the last to choose, and the only text remaining was Ulmer’s. All that I can recall of this class is a series of befuddling seminars, which I felt were more akin to mathematics than literature. I can also recall the cigarette breaks, for which I stupidly braved the bone-chilling pain of a Canadian winter.</p>
<p>SKULDUGGERY: [n] verbal misrepresentation intended to take advantage of you in some way.</p>
<p>I’m not sure that I completely grasped what Ulmer was up to in <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span>, but I knew one thing for certain: I wanted to make a mystory. What’s more, I wanted to make a mystory on my computer, which at the time was a 640K portable unit with no hard drive. While this proved impossible, I did manage to gain access to a 386 in the office of a friend who worked for Corel. He not only loaned me the machine, but, after listening to my design goals, he also introduced me to Freelance Graphics, a presentation software package whose market value was destroyed by PowerPoint. Using Freelance, I created a mystory with a specific timeline that scrolled across the screen in about three minutes. I learned simultaneously how to “do theory” and how to work in Freelance Graphics, both of which I approached as an amateur.</p>
<p>SKULKING: [adj] marked by quiet and caution and secrecy; taking pains to avoid being observed. See also: dodging, escape, evasion.</p>
<p>By the time it came for my seminar on <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span>, the snow was melting. I remember the Proustian flash of smelling spring as I walked to class, which I had arranged to hold in a computer lab. I loaded my Freelance “slide show” into a 486 equipped with an LCD projector panel, and sat nervously as text blocks and images scrolled by, leaving my classmates as befuddled as they had left me during their own presentations. After the last words scrolled by, the professor asked me to explain what I had created, but I couldn’t. I suggested that my mystory, which integrated <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span> itself into the popcycle, was intended to be a stand-alone, a performance piece designed to create ‘an effect’, provoke discussion. ‘An effect?’ asked the professor. ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’ Neither was I. I didn’t really understand what I had created, and I had no particular goal in mind when creating it. I was working blindly, gluing together various snippets of discourse without any particular direction except that offered by the film-like sequencing effects in Freelance. During the summer term, I was often berated for this performance, and labeled mockingly as ‘a mystorian.’</p>
<p>SKOL: [n] Fortran pre-processor for COS (Cray Operating System).</p>
<p>Just recently, I discovered a fragmented copy of this mystory on a diskette and loaded it into my abandoned Pentium II. The “show” flew by so quickly that it was nearly impossible to read the text. Advances in processing speed have rendered the mystory unreadable, even on a Pentium II.</p>
<h2><a class="outbound" href="http://libarts.udmercy.edu/marcel/gibb/gibcover.html">Gibberish: A Digital Hiding Place for Pomo Sapiens</a></h2>
<p>SCULLER: [n] someone who skulls (moves a long oar pivoted on the back of the boat to propel the boat forward). See also: oarsman, rower.</p>
<p>I abandoned Freelance Graphics when I enrolled for a second M.A., this time in Creative Writing, at the University of Windsor. A computer scientist, with whom I was discussing Eastgate’s first beta version of StorySpace, introduced me to HTML and the World Wide Web. What he showed me seemed much more flexible and robust than StorySpace, which at the time could only embed images as black and white bitmap files. I spent my year as a Creative Writing student assembling infinite hypertext networks of critical theory quotes in which nearly every word was “hotlinked,” as we said back then.</p>
<p>SCULD: [n] Goddess of fate: Future. See also: Norn.</p>
<p>My education in theory, then, was classical, acquired by a word-for-word transcribing of “the masters” from print to screen. Longinus himself would have approved of this method, which also describes how I learned HTML, “stealing” code from the web pages of others.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">This writer shows us, if only we were willing to pay him heed, that another way (beyond anything we have mentioned) leads to the sublime. And what, and what manner of way, may that be? It is the imitation and emulation of previous great poets and writers. And let this, my dear friend, be an aim to which we steadfastly apply ourselves. For many men are carried away by the spirit of others as if inspired, just as it is related of the Pythian priestess when she approaches the tripod, where there is a rift in the ground which (they say) exhales divine vapour. By heavenly power thus communicated she is impregnated and straightway delivers oracles in virtue of the afflatus. Similarly from the great natures of the men of old there are borne in upon the souls of those who emulate them (as from sacred caves) what we may describe as <span class="lightEmphasis">effluences</span>, so that even those who seem little likely to be possessed are thereby inspired and succumb to the spell of the others’ greatness. (Longinus, “On The Sublime”, Chapter XIII)</p>
<p>In the end, I learned more about writing - primarily, how to maintain a complex sequential argument - by transcribing Barthes and assembling HTML code than I did in all the workshops I attended in grad school. While I did write my share of short stories - all conventional fiction - my M.A. project was a hypertext entitled “Gibberish,” in which I ironically applied postmodern theory to a number of paintings by the Windsor artist Stephen Gibb. I sent a link to an early version of the project to Greg Ulmer, along with a diskette containing the mystory I had created in Ottawa. Ulmer suggested that I apply to the University of Florida’s PhD program.</p>
<h2><a class="outbound" href="http://libarts.udmercy.edu/marcel/blake/10/">1/0</a></h2>
<p>SKULL AND CROSSBONES: [n] emblem warning of danger or death. See also: black flag, emblem, Jolly Roger, pirate flag.</p>
<p>What frustrated me about Ulmer’s seminars was not the lack of direction, a lack of those predictable assignments that are the whipping boys of heuretics, but the fact that, in Ulmer’s terms, we were in class ‘to do theory, not art.’ In other words, our goal was not to make things that look pretty, but to work with ideas, to invent methods, even if our goal was to invent a ‘picture theory.’ Isn’t it possible, I thought, to achieve a more holistic combination of theory and aesthetics? William Blake, for example, invented relief-etch printing, a method - inspired by his own distaste for mechanical engraving techniques - which he outlines in visionary detail in <span class="booktitle">The Marriage of Heaven and Hell</span>. The problem was that not one of us in the seminars was trained as an artist. We were all English majors working with the tools at our disposal. We couldn’t draw or paint, but we could certainly steal images off the Web and manipulate them.</p>
<p>SCULLION: [n] a kitchen servant employed to do menial tasks.</p>
<p>My opus mystorius as a student of Ulmer’s was a hypertext I ended up calling <span class="booktitle">1/0</span> based on the recurrent pattern of 1 and 0 or I and O shapes that serendipitously appeared in the images I had chosen for the project. <span class="booktitle">1/0</span> uses a popcycle to explore/explode the issue of racism that I encountered as a Canadian living in the Southern United States. Included in the popcycle is the work of William Blake, particularly the “Little Black Boy” engraving from the <span class="booktitle">Songs of Innocence</span>.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">My mother bore me in the southern wild,<br />
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;<br />
White as an angel is the English child,<br />
But I am black, as if bereav’d of light.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">1/0</span> played a central role in my dissertation, which amounts to a lengthy explanation that I wish I could have offered four years earlier to my theory professor at the University of Ottawa.</p>
<h2><a class="outbound" href="http://libarts.udmercy.edu/e-crit/enl491/blake/4fold.html">The 4fold Vision</a></h2>
<p>SCULP: [v.t.] to sculpture; to carve; to engrave [Obs. or Humorous].</p>
<p>Something about the materiality of Blake’s work, his holistic interweaving of philosophy, art, and technics, suggests a fruitful model for thinking about discourse in the electronic apparatus. After graduating from the University of Florida, my primary obsession was to invent a new mode of academic discourse by drawing on William Blake as a “media exemplar.” I devised an assignment for my students entitled <span class="booktitle">The 4Fold Vision</span>, which is an image-rich modification of the mystory form. Rather than drawing on verbal puncepts as a method of interlinking modes of discourse, The 4Fold is glued together with visual puns motivated by the schematic shapes in Blake’s art: the arch, the inverted U, the circle, and the spiral.</p>
<p>SKULLCAP: [n] rounded brimless cap fitting the crown of the head. See also: beanie.</p>
<p>When I introduced the assignment to my E-Crit students, the response was one of befuddlement, and the results were varied. Among graduating seniors this term, this assignment stands out as the one that had the greatest impact on their formation as media critics and designers. A 4Fold Vision completed by <a class="outbound" href="http://liberalarts.udmercy.edu/~ruudar/portfolio/electronica/ani_gif.htm">Amy Ruud</a>, one of the first E-Crit graduates, traces the ‘O’ shape through the film <span class="filmtitle">Dogma</span>, the Berlin Wall, Baudrillard, Blake and her friend’s brain tumor. Her animated gif captures the schematic essence of her 4Fold, but what impressed me most was the “justification” that she wrote to accompany her project. I had never before required students to write a justification of their work in experimental critical theory. At this point, I realized that <span class="foreignWord">écriture</span> had to remain central to E-Crit. I began assigning lengthy essays in my classes.</p>
<h2>Necromedia</h2>
<p>SKULL, THE PLACE OF A: See GOLGOTHA: [n] a hill near Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified.</p>
<p>In the winter of 2001, I began investigating a pattern of coincidental relationships that I had noticed between death and media technology. These included Watson’s gallows telephone, Marey’s chronophotographic rifle, and the first human ultrasound, which took place in the disused turret of a B-29 bomber. Technology’s greatest end is for military uses, for the destruction of human beings. Technology renders bodies immobile and redundant. Technology promotes ghost industries and fantasies of immortality. I invented the term “necromedia” to describe this seeming collusion between death and media technologies. Soon, necromedia scenes appeared everywhere: in <span class="filmtitle">American Beauty</span>’s elision of gun and video camera; in <span class="filmtitle">Vanilla Sky</span>’s Coltrane hologram and cryogenic dreaming; in <span class="filmtitle">Ringu</span>’s lethal and ghostly VHS tape.</p>
<p>SKULL: [n] the bony skeleton of the head of vertebrates. See also: axial skeleton, bone, braincase, head, jaw, jugal bone, mala, malar bone, orbit, orbital cavity, os, os sphenoidale, os zygomaticum, sphenoid bone, zygomatic bone.</p>
<p>I began taking very seriously Katherine Hayles’ suggestion that we learn to accept and celebrate our finitude. She was echoing Heidegger’s concerns about technology and being, but without the luddite and fascist associations that have made Heidegger inconvenient for media critics.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">We now name that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve: “ge-stell” (enframing). We dare to use this word in a sense that has been thoroughly unfamiliar up to now. According to ordinary usage, the word Gestell (frame) means some kind of apparatus, e.g., a bookrack. Gestell is also the name for a <span class="emphasis">skeleton</span>. And the employment of the word Gestell (enframing) that is now required of us seems equally eerie, not to speak of the arbitrariness with which words of a mature language are so misused. (Heidegger, 1977: npn)</p>
<p>How do we celebrate our finitude when, all around us, others are celebrating their capacity to be placed on call as cybernetic standing reserve? After teaching a few courses on necromedia, it occurred to me that the sprawling hypertext projects I was assigning encouraged only a drive toward infinity, a resistance to finitude. I was hoping to provoke the opposite of that resistance, an acceptance and celebration of finitude.</p>
<h2><a class="outbound" href="http://www.e-crit.com/running/">Running (Posthu)Man</a></h2>
<p>SKULL SESSION: [n] a practice match; teaching strategy to an athletic team. See also: grooming, preparation, training.</p>
<p>A few years ago I ran my first marathon. I took up running to relieve work-related stress, provoke creative thought, and to alleviate the chronic back pain that resulted from sitting for several hours a day in front of a screen. Since then I have been running trail races only, primarily 50K ultra marathons. Over time, my necromedia course morphed into a design studio on running, based, of course, on a concept I developed while running. The studio is not only about running in the strictly biomechanical sense, but also in the various metaphorical outcroppings of the word, which provide a vehicle for discussing the impact of media technologies on time, space, and the body. I have asked students in the class to develop Flash movies that will play on a laptop cable-hacked into a treadmill. The heartbeat and speed of a runner or walker will power these movies. My own movie, entitled <span class="filmtitle">DREADMILL</span>, revolves around the increasing immobility of our culture (Detroit was named “America’s fattest city” this year). It draws heavily on the necromedia concept, and combines graphics, text, clips from Hollywood film, and talking heads. I now realize that I have moved away from the infinitude of hypertext, and am turning back toward the genre of my first mystory.</p>
<p>SKULL: [n] [see {school} a multitude.] a school, company, or shoal. [Obs.]</p>
<p>Jeff Rice, a colleague of mine (also a former student of Ulmer’s and “cool” theorist), noted that the <span class="filmtitle">DREADMILL</span> project is very Ulmerian in nature because it draws on an outrageous, perhaps surrealist premise: ‘you need a treadmill to teach a media studies class.’ I hadn’t considered this perspective, which Jeff was quick to offer in rebuttal to my recent threats about abandoning the Florida School and hypertext for Blake and artists’ books. What I do know is that the concept of putting a treadmill in an English Department classroom and wiring it to a laptop is emblematic of what I see as the future of Humanities research in a culture driven by technological efficiency. This interdisciplinary project, which involves the cooperation of faculty and students in E-Crit, Engineering, Architecture, and English, places the Humanities back at the core of higher education. In opposition to the techno-scientific focus of the contemporary university, I would propose a program not in humanities computing, or even in human/computer interaction, but in <span class="lightEmphasis">humane computing</span>, a program that puts both the body and mind, with all their finite limitations, in a holistic relationship with the development of new technologies.</p>
<h2>Post-Run Cooldown</h2>
<p>Just recently I discovered that I suffered a stress fracture in my left hip, a result of obsessive training, combined with long races that are beyond the limitations of my biomechanical abilities. I will require a hip replacement in the near future, which will qualify me as a literal cyborg. I wonder if, at that point, I will begin to reconsider the emancipatory potential of cyberspace. In any case, it will make for a great mystory on becoming un-hip.</p>
<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p>Blake, William.”Little Black Boy” <span class="booktitle">Songs of Innocence</span> (1789) in <span class="booktitle">The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake</span>. Edited by David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988).</p>
<p><span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.blakearchive.org">The William Blake Archive</a></span> (March 22, 2004).</p>
<p>Hayles, Katherine. <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman</span> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).</p>
<p>Heidegger, Martin. <span class="booktitle">The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays</span> Translated by William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977).</p>
<p><span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.hyperdictionary.com">Hyperdictionary</a></span> (March 22, 2004).</p>
<p>Landow, George. <span class="booktitle">Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</span> (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).</p>
<p>Longinus, <span class="booktitle">On the Sublime</span> Translated by W. Rhys Roberts. (Cambridge, 1899), <a class="outbound" href="http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/longinus/index.htm">Peitho’s web</a> (March 22, 2004).</p>
<p>Shakespeare, William. <span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/hamlet/">Hamlet</a></span> (1600).</p>
<p>Ulmer, Gregory L. <span class="booktitle">Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video</span> (New York and London: Routledge, 1989).</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/ulmer">ulmer</a>, <a href="/tags/hamlet">hamlet</a>, <a href="/tags/longinus">Longinus</a>, <a href="/tags/running">running</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/theory">theory</a>, <a href="/tags/teletheory">teletheory</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1200 at http://electronicbookreview.comA Project for a New Consultancyhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/reinventive
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Greg Ulmer</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-03-15</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Gregory Ulmer describes his current work, not as scholarship or critical writing, but as a “project for a new consultancy.” And it was partly for advice that I initially contacted Ulmer to request an interview for the <span class="booktitle">electronic book review</span>. I wanted to see whether Ulmer’s ideas about electronic literacy (“byteracy”) could be of use in designing an online review of books and media. Also, since I happened to be organizing an <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> forum around Michael Bérubé’s article, <a class="outbound" href="http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr2/2ulmer.htm">The Politics of Selling Out</a>, I thought that Ulmer might help me to extend Bérubé’s arguments to electronic economies. I reasoned: the professor who in the eighties conceived a project to televise Derridean theory, and who is now working to computerize it, ought to have something to say about the role of public intellectuals on the Internet.</p>
<p>Ulmer and I conducted the discussion via email, from mid-October of 1995 through the end of February 1996. A lot of other things were going on in both our writing lives during those months. Ulmer had just returned from Australia, where he was involved in at least two other interviewing projects in diverse media, and participating in the electronic curriculum design of a Sydney-based university that’s going to be devoted entirely to a sustainable future. I was busy with the launch of <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> - a preoccupation which I allowed to seep into a number of my interview questions. From the start, the pace of the Q and A was irregular; Ulmer was scrupulous about answering every question, but not always at the moment when I’d asked it. He wrote: “What this email mode of interview lacks in coherence it makes up for in disorganization.” We decided to go ahead with a multi-part observation on the Bérubé article, and continue separately the conversation we had going. “These two will interact and echo,” Ulmer wrote, “but I like the idea of having two related but distinct discussions underway. This multi-versation is an aspect of MOOing that I enjoy very much (due to lag and limits of attention one tends to enter into more than one conversation with the same person!).”</p>
<p>Over time, though, another result was produced by our email “conversation,” something less improvisational than a MOO interaction, yet more fluid than a print essay. During the editing I began to regard the essay interview, or “eterview,” as a set of two parallel essays, composed simultaneously and in tandem by separate hands. I’ve tried to preserve some of the real-time multiplicity of our exchanges by interspersing occasional unedited email exchanges. The interview itself is a provisionally unfinished work with its processes still stirring and even showing through; at various points, it opens onto other conversations. Hypertext links will take readers to some of the projects that Ulmer is currently involved in, and there are also links to a new <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/compositional">essay</a> on his work by <a class="outbound" href="http://www.uta.edu/english/V/Victor_.html">Victor Vitanza</a>, written to order for this issue of <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>. Those readers who are following the Sellout forum, and who would like to get Ulmer’s take on Bérubé, can scroll down to the section, midway through, titled, comments on “Michael Bérubé’s selling out essay.”</p>
<h2>question 1: the reinview</h2>
<p><span class="emphasis">[joseph tabbi]</span> I’d like to begin talking about the <span class="lightEmphasis">purpose</span> of this interview, and how best to conduct it so as to make use of our electronic medium. As I see it, the interview is a genre now, a form that has been institutionalized in academia no less than in journalism. In what ways might hypertext reading and writing enable us to reinvent this genre? You say, early in <span class="booktitle">Heuretics</span>, that the aim of criticism should be to guide “a generative experiment: Based on a given theory, how might <span class="lightEmphasis">another</span> text be composed?” What sort of work do you suppose might be generated by an electronic interview?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[gregory ulmer]</span> Victor Vitanza and a group of his colleagues associated with the online part of the journal <span class="journaltitle">PreText</span>, have been experimenting with a form of the electronic interview they call the reinview - a hybrid of the book review and the interview. They have tried this with several books/authors, with <span class="booktitle">Heuretics</span> /Ulmer being one of the trials. A small group of people on the list agreed to read the book and pose questions to me. The list is quite complex in its organization, being actually a collection of different sublists devoted to different aspects of rhetoric. The reinviews are conducted on one of the sublists, and follow a set of protocols, including the requirement to work cooperatively. You will recognize that requirement as one of the operating assumptions of the Socratic dialogue that distinguishes it from eristics: cooperation among friends, rather than combat among enemies. Flames are not prohibited as such but they are directed to a different sublist, to which the participants in the reinview may or may not be subscribed.</p>
<p>I enjoyed doing the reinview. However, what actually occurred and what I had hoped for were not the same thing. What appealed to me about the form is that it used the electronic medium to actualize what is the practical condition of the book review: the principal (and perhaps only) reader of a review is the author of the book being reviewed. A common feature of the review is the impression on the author’s part that s/he has been misunderstood. For example, what has always bothered me about the reviews of <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span> was the way the reviewers usually dismissed the final chapter, the experiment, the mystory: “Derrida at the Little Bighorn.” The interesting effect of electronic mediation is that it does leave everything else in place (the circumstances of print literacy). The reinview is not simply a chance for the author to set the reviewers straight about intention, meaning, or anything else.</p>
<p>Here we get to your question about the interview. What changes in the electronic setting? My comments on this change are based more on my theories about byteracy (electronic literacy, which I also call computeracy and electracy) than on what happened in my reinview. In byteracy intention is subordinate to pragmatics. Reviewers complained that <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span> was still a book, despite talking about videocy. I still had intentions when I wrote <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span>. <span class="booktitle">Heuretics</span> is a book also, but one that opens (via <span class="lightEmphasis">choragraphy</span>) onto byteracy by leaving up to the reader the construction of instructions for the electronic rhetoric (hyperrhetoric) evoked in the book. Writing online is not an act of communication.</p>
<p>What kind of work might an online interview generate? I think of such an interview as a consultation. It is not a spectacle or expression in which an author presents a show or package of information to an audience. Rather, it is a collaboration, with all parties including in the rhetoric the collective register of language and culture. Perhaps you can see the assumptions of this approach: the change in technology is also a change in institutional practices and (and here will no doubt be the point of controversy) a change in subjectivation. The reason intentions don’t matter online is not only because the technology permits a different relationship to information, but because intentions are projections of individual selves, and subjects formed in an electronic apparatus will not be constructed in terms of self. Flamewars are a symptom of selves out of place, and will disappear along with the subordination of literacy to byteracy.</p>
<p>In practical terms, I had hoped that the reinview could become a consultancy. The point would not be for me to explain my intentions, etc. in <span class="booktitle">Heuretics</span>, but that a group might take up the project of choragraphy (also spelled chorography) and push it further, beyond the book, into the work of the reviewers. It would be a mutual engagement in which the group tested the value of choragraphy for themselves, with their own projects; my role would be to consult on that application, so the focus would be less on me and more on this collaboration. This plan did not materialize, one reason being perhaps the limitation of the reinview, which inevitably is centered on the author. Another limitation is the kind of time such work takes. I know in my own case that (following another one of the wise protocols of the list) I would spend most of a day composing my post offline, and then attach it in a Eudora post. Who has that kind of time? It was my book in question so I took the time and got a lot out of the experience. But what was in it for the reviewers? I thought the consulting concept might address that limitation, and that is the possibility I would still like to explore.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[jt]</span> I’m glad you raise the issue of reviewing - since rethinking what this means is something I want to do, in public, right at the start, with <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>. I want to do my best to “cover” the body of your work, not for its own sake, but because your books can be imitated, and variations can be worked on them in the electronic medium. Like the Derridean model that has inspired many of your thought experiments, <span class="booktitle">Applied Grammatology</span>, <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Heuretics</span> can serve me as “generative forms for the production of another text” (<span class="booktitle">Applied Grammatology</span> xi). And the “other text,” in this case, will be <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> itself (insofar as the journal’s policy is influenced by your aesthetic).</p>
<p>There’s something liberating in Vitanza’s conception of the reinview, and there’s something attractively selfless, generous, or perhaps simply realistic in the recognition that one’s work and one’s books have lives of their own and generate meanings that remain outside the author’s control. The electronic medium, I agree, can provide an excellent means of modelling and perhaps orchestrating the reception of a book, furthering its ideas in a space that is unconfined by the enclosure of a book’s covers. You wish to take the review “beyond the book, and into the work of the reviewers.” So do I.</p>
<p>At the same time, however, something in me resists this transformation from author to consultant. And while I am sympathetic to the “change in subjectivation” implied by the disappearance of both the author and the self, I’ve never been able to enter into group writing experiments with the same focused attention as when I enter into a strong narrative, or a coherent, authorially-guided argument. (I hope I’m not disqualifying myself for this interview by admitting so much at the start!) Perhaps what disturbs me about such ventures is that collaboration, rather than eliminating intentions, multiplies them by the number of collaborators.</p>
<p>One aspect of your work that I find particularly useful is your attempt to relate literary and technological practices to the institutions that enclose them - including the emerging electronic institutions that affect our work most directly. Along those lines, I have some questions concerning the difficulties grammatology has had in establishing itself as an institutional practice <span class="lightEmphasis">outside</span> of Literature departments. I’ll hold onto these questions, however, until I’ve heard your initial response to Michael Bérubé’s essay on a related theme, “Cultural Studies and the Politics of Selling Out.”</p>
<p>———–<br />
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 1995 10:48:35 -0400<br />
From: greg ulmer<br />
To: <a href="mailto:jtabbi@uic.edu">jtabbi@uic.edu</a><br />
Subject: interview</p>
<p>Hi Joe<br />
I enclose my opening response to your questions. I have read the Bérubé and liked it quite a bit. I am sure I can find something to say about it. Do you want me to go ahead and post something or do you want to reply to this post and move in that direction…?<br />
Assuming I still remember how to use Eudora…<br />
———–</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">comments on Michael Bérubé’s “Selling Out” essay</span><br />
Gregory Ulmer</p>
<p>I like Michael Bérubé’s essay on the “politics of selling out,” which raises many of the questions that have concerned me in my exploration of an “applied” grammatology. I admire Bérubé’s ventures into the magazine article as well as his analysis of the complexities of the function of intellectuals. I believe that theory has a contribution to make to this issue. Applied grammatology is committed to action; the problem is - to what action? The issue is, to paraphrase the title John Cage gave to his journals/diary: how to improve the world without making things worse?</p>
<p>I will discuss the actions I have undertaken in a subsequent post. For now, I will address what I have learned from grammatology about the nature of the problem. Grammatology frames this question in terms of the apparatus (the interactive matrix of technology, institutional practices, and identity formation). In these epochal terms, the public sphere, democratic institutions, the nation state, the concept of privacy and the individual, are all features of a literate apparatus. Grammatology led me from my original interests in comparative literature into media studies (and ultimately to computing) because of the implications of the apparatus: as the matrix changes, civilization changes; the change is gradual, but total; the nature of the change is not determined in advance, but invented historically. I turned my attention first to video (and its institutionalization in television). My concern was not to break into magazines, but to understand the dynamics of the televisual (teletheory).</p>
<p>Benedict Anderson’s <span class="booktitle">Imagined Communities</span> is a concise statement of what is at stake: the nation state is an idea made possible and sustained by literacy: first created by high culture authors who crafted the vulgate into a specific vehicle of cultural values, and then by pop culture mass media, that allowed everyone in the group to stay on the same page, so to speak. As our civilization continues its mutation into an electronic apparatus, the theory suggests that different collective arrangements will emerge. Many of the political fights underway today are rearguard skirmishes over this institutional and identity shift. Of the three unities of the nation state - economic, geographic, and symbolic unity - almost nothing remains as a result of globalization.</p>
<p>One possibility, of course, is that everywhere will be <span class="lightEmphasis">America</span>. Imagine fifty billion people (world population doubling every decade in the next century) and a balanced budget in one world society. None of our institutions as presently conceived will support such a prospect, nor even the material conditions of such a world. As I said, however, the theory of the apparatus suggests that in electracy there will not be nation states or humanistic individual selves.</p>
<p>Given this theory (it is given for my project) what is to be done? The task for intellectuals now is similar to the one undertaken at the beginning of the modern age - to take the new vulgate (world popular culture emerging in electronic media) and forge it into a discourse capable of supporting and extending the fullest powers of intelligence, both personal and collective. How? The function of theory is to help propose a way to answer this call for invention.</p>
<p>Next: The POPCYCLE.</p>
<p>———–<br />
Date: Mon, 7 Jan 1996 20:23:01 -0600 (CST)<br />
From: Joseph Tabbi<br />
To: Greg Ulmer<br />
Subject: Re: eterview–cont. berube1</p>
<p>We were about to discuss Bérubé, were we not? I find it interesting that your comments so far relate mainly to Bérubé’s closing argument, and that you diverge markedly from his (albeit tentative) call for a return to a sort of nationalism. The reason for this divergence isn’t hard to find: nationalism in the U.S. is clearly motivated by the dominance of transnational markets, whose corporate leaders have no direct civic or social responsibility, and hence small professional interest in preserving a public sphere. National leaders at least are responsible to a “public” (if such an entity can be said to exist today as more than a media invention) whereas the designers of the electracy are, for the most part, as yet, responsible only to stockholders.</p>
<p>For you, globalizaton is less strictly an economic phenomenon; it involves primarily the creation of an “electronic apparatus” that is displacing not only the nation state, but the literate apparatus on which democratic nations are founded. Democracy is being replaced by an electracy, and resistance (of the sort that developed in a democratic, literate context) is irrelevant now. One has little choice, therefore, but to sell out in Bérubé’s sense of the term. But what would it mean to sell into an electracy?</p>
<p>The Internet certainly looks to me like a natural place for doing cultural work, and if the Internet is commercialized, then academics and writers on the ‘net certainly are left with small choice. Which is not to say that we need to give up on ethical commitment or get in step with the Fortune 500 program (to paraphrase one of Bérubé’s respondents). You suggest that cultural work will no longer be sponsored by institutions (such as English Departments?) which are grounded in literacy, but that such work will participate in and help to inform an electroliterate “world popular culture.” I await your elaboration…<br />
———–</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Bérubé commentary continued</span><br />
Gregory Ulmer</p>
<p>Quandaries of Poststructural Consulting<br />
I apologize for reviewing so much familiar ground, and at the same time for asserting in shorthand: I seem to be determined to fill in as much context as possible, mainly because even though the epistemology within which I am working suggests that attempting to influence policy is misplaced energy, I am committed nonetheless to a <span class="lightEmphasis">Project For a New Consultancy</span> (which I hope to be able to describe eventually).</p>
<p>Quandary #1 - Progress?<br />
I am trying to get to my point of agreement with Bérubé’s desire to bring critical theory into contact with policy making. To get there I have to first account for at least a shorthand version of the epistemology within which I am framing the agreement - applied grammatology (AG). AG is a contradiction in terms, in principle, since it falls within a poststructural theory of the apparatus, which puts it outside the pale/pail of both humanism and marxism.</p>
<p>The desire to influence policy indicates a continuing belief in the enlightenment project and in the possibility of progress in some form or other. It could be nothing more than the resigned view that if the rest of the society is going to function according to rationalized planning, then we ought to try to have input into those plans. The enlightenment crisis, including the loss of faith in progress, is based on the discontinuity articulating nature and culture. The history of progress shows the fundamental unforseeability of the consequences of our collective actions. Science is based on the ability to predict and control outcomes. This frame of reference emerged only recently and even more recently became dominant over the frame of fate or destiny (and then only in some parts of the world). The most optimistic view of planning might be that science gets it right most of the time, but the irrationality of individuals and institutions makes it difficult to execute the truths of science in an efficient way. One of the most amazing events of this decade, from the pov of poststructuralism, is the awarding of a Nobel Prize in Economics to the U of Chicago prof who demonstrated empirically that emotional factors prevent individuals from making economic decisions that reason would seem to dictate. We all know the Gulag solution to such recalcitrance (take the example of the Soviet solution to the refusal of the landed peasants to agree to the Stalinist policy of collectivization).</p>
<p>Quandary #2 - Problem<br />
Within the apparatus of literacy, from Plato to Bérubé (?), the difficulty of the enlightenment project has been conceived as the opposition between dialectic and rhetoric (to put it in those terms). Policy making might be posed as a 2-step process: to find the truth; then to persuade others that what you know to be true really is the case. As we all know, since rhetoric included the possibility of separating truth from persuading (making it possible to persuade in the absence of truth), rhetoric or sophistry was condemned. The goal was to prove by demonstration alone (logos). This goal was achieved by modern science, in which the persuasion is precisely the reproducibility of the proof. Or so it was claimed. Recent work has shown that science as an institution retained and practiced rhetoric throughout its history. Moreover, the legibility of pure logos depended upon the formation of specialized experts, knowledge ninjas, capable of communicating in the invented languages of proof. The social issue of policy making is relative to these special conditions of discipline formation.</p>
<p>From the point of view of AG, the arrangements described above are relative to the literate apparatus (as I keep saying). To note just two features of the arrangements that indicate what is at stake: the concept of <span class="lightEmphasis">problem</span> - the formulation of experience in terms of <span class="lightEmphasis">problems</span> posed such that a discourse exists within which a solution may be found. Every dimension of literate experience is couched within our discourses in terms of <span class="lightEmphasis">problems</span> with solutions (from bad breath to bad death). Humans have always experienced difficulties, just as they have always told stories (the stories were about these difficulties). What changes when the apparatus changes is the civilizational framing, form, attitude, v-v problem and story.</p>
<p>The premise of AG is that in electracy our civilization will not understand itself in terms of problems with solutions.</p>
<p>next: Quandary #3: communication</p>
<p>———–<br />
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 22:18:01 -0600 (CST)<br />
From: Joseph Tabbi<br />
To: Greg Ulmer<br />
Subject: Re: the cultural politics of the gift (3 questions)</p>
<p>Greg,<br />
Your most recent entry reaches me along with several essays responding to Bérubé’s piece. Among the various responses, including yours, I notice an overall discomfort with Bérubé’s n/r/ationalist politics, not to mention a resistance to his eloquence. Some of the respondents seem to go out of their way to avoid eloquence in their own response. It’s as if these mostly academic writers have realized that intellectual rhetoric, and “writing literate arguments,” won’t get you very far in political debates, which scarcely ever take place in anything like a “public sphere.”</p>
<p>But (like Bérubé) none of the respondents despairs of political activity per se, which is a nice change from the usual pomo/left paralysis. One or two people have useful things to say about the role that “theory” might play in keeping the activist - the “public intellectual” - honest (so long as theory itself can be tested now and then against hard political actualities). In your responses, you have begun to provide a conceptual “framework” for influencing policy. I’m interested in knowing just how theory might be pressed into service, into providing an aleatory, gift-based alternative to a rationalist politics based on a cause and effect model.</p>
<p>1. How might the cultural politics of the gift differ from the politics of selling out, in practice?</p>
<p>2. Could you, perhaps, offer a list of things an intellectual ought to try doing, pragmatically speaking? How does one go about setting up shop as a consultant in the new electracy?</p>
<p>3. How might the notion of an intellectual “forum” (such as the one I’m conducting around Bérubé’s essay) be reconstructed in an electronic environment? If we’re to eschew rationalist debate, on what terms can we enter into productive formal conversations?</p>
<p>More questions soon,<br />
Joe ———–</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Bérubé commentary continued</span><br />
Gregory Ulmer</p>
<p>Quandary #3–communication</p>
<p>My approach to this commentary has been to construct a grammatological frame for assessing the options available for meeting Bérubé’s goal of bringing critical studies knowledge to bear on policy making. Bérubé’s decision to work within the mode of journalism, the magazine medium, makes perfect sense in the apparatus of literacy. My response, however, is to reconsider this decision in the light of the shift in our apparatus from literacy to electracy. I am basing my speculations about the nature of electracy on a poststructuralist epistemology.</p>
<p>…A further quandary for the poststructural consultant wanting to influence policy using the electronic media has to do with the dissolution of the communications model organizing language practices in electracy. One thing continental and anglo-american theorists agreed upon in literacy was that language exchanges were founded on a contractual economy with its assumptions of sincerity, efficiency, cooperation, and the like (viz Grice or Habermas). The practices of truth telling strictly enforced this contract using the rules of argument as a standard. Our public discourse maintained its ties with the classical Greek models (Aristotle) long after they were subordinated or abandoned in other areas. Fiction narrative was devoted to a display of situations in which the contracts of exchange were violated. The narrative ended with the restoration of the contract.</p>
<p>In electracy the economy of language moves away from an exchange controlled by contracts towards a mode theorized thus far in terms of the gift or the remainder. Theories of the gift indicate a renewed role for chance and all manner of aleatory factors in language. The linguistics of the gift favors all those elements of natural language suppressed in the grammar of literacy. The new grammar is being theorized as the <span class="lightEmphasis">remainder</span> (viz Lecercle, <span class="booktitle">The Violence of Language</span> for a good summary of the remainder).</p>
<p>The forces motivating these shifts and inversions, these deconstructions, are pragmatic, having to do with the fit between natural language, the new technologies, and the emerging institutions of electracy. In the future of learned discourse, writing literate arguments is going to go the way of writing in Latin.</p>
<p>Next: the Popcycle (finally).</p>
<p>———–<br />
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 22:15:01 -0600 (CST)<br />
From: Joseph Tabbi<br />
To: greg ulmer<br />
Subject: Re: the public sphere in an electracy</p>
<p>I like the way you historicize the concept of the public sphere. After all, the modernist public sphere may only have existed for a decade or two in the 18th century (and later in a handful of English cafes). If we allow the modernist model to pass into history, perhaps we can better imagine its reconstitution in an electronic context.</p>
<p>Right now, <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> is poised precisely between journalism and education, disciplines which you say are battling with one another for ascendancy in the electronic regime. How are we to position ourselves so as to become a conduit for various discourses? The old forms are pretty hard to break free of, even in the assigning of books for review. It’s hard to find someone who can speak, not as an evaluating peer, and not as an expert making ideas accessible to a popular audience, but as a writer among writers, who was once a reader among readers (before composing the review).</p>
<p>That’s the ideal I’m after.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Bérubé commentary concluded</span><br />
Gregory Ulmer ———–</p>
<p>the POPCYCLE</p>
<p>The grammatological approach to consulting uses the theory of the apparatus to formulate a plan of intervention in the public sphere as it is being reorganized within electracy. The decline of the public sphere in this context means the transformation of the public sphere from one apparatus to another. The assumption is that there may be a public sphere and a democratic society in an electrate civilization, but there is no guarantee: the practices for such a thing must be invented and disseminated in existing or new institutions (as happened with literacy).</p>
<p>The details of policy formation and dissemination addressed by Bérubé reflect the nature of literate institutional history. Specifically - the development of specialization and expertise apart from the general population; the establishment of an epistemology (since Plato) requiring both knowing-how and knowing-that (craft and meta-craft). A major factor in the rise of journalism has been the need for a mediating form to popularize knowledge (in which the experts address the general public) and to allow circulation of knowledge across the divisions of expertise (Habermas notes the role of middlebrow magazines in disseminating ideas from one expertise to another, in a condition in which an expert in one field is a layperson in all the others).</p>
<p>The instrumentalization of the life world diagnosed as the cause of the <span class="lightEmphasis">decline</span> of the public sphere is a feature of ignoring the nature of the apparatus. Technology is only one part of the apparatus, which includes as well institutional practices and individual subject formation. The challenge to education in electracy is to invent a new dimension of education beyond the current arrangements (general education leading to specialization). The history of the apparatus indicates that the old apparatus is absorbed into and repositioned in relation to the new one. General and specialized education will persist in electrate education, realigned v-v the new technologies.</p>
<p>In the language fields the shift in apparatus suggests an opportunity/challenge to redress at least some of the aspects of alienation caused by the givens of modernity. Literate/modern apparatus organizes all aspects of the lifeworld via analysis, breaking wholes into singular compartments. The compartments operate as if they were autonomous, and the necessity of synthesis, while recognized, is assumed to take place <span class="lightEmphasis">elsewhere</span>. E.g., we experience this in education: the smorgasboard of choices assumes the synthesis takes place (magically) in the student’s head. What happens in fact is the internalization of compartmentalization alienation.</p>
<p>Compartmentalization alienates because it is impossible to grasp the whole (grasping the whole is not the same as seeking a totalizing or absolute control, although the desire for the latter is motivated by the alienation of the literate apparatus).</p>
<p>The promise of the new technology - multimedia equipment globally interlinked - is that a wholistic thinking is possible in electracy. For the potential of the new medium to support wholistic thinking to be realized requires the invention of a new institutional practice of writing. I have tried to theorize the conditions of this opportunity in my various publications in terms of the <span class="lightEmphasis">popcycle</span>. The popcycle names the basic institutions of discourse inhabited by modern people. The 4 primary discourses are Family, Entertainment, School (k-12), and Discipline. 2 related institution/discourses that may take priority in certain cases are: the Street and the Church. Each institutional discourse has its own logic, form, mode of proof, preferred medium, sphere of influence. In modernity these institutions are kept strictly separate and are related in terms of a ranked hierarchy. This arrangement is a necessary feature of literacy.</p>
<p>In electracy the equipment makes it possible to bring all the practices currently functioning in each of the separate discourses into contact in one shared medium. What is needed is a practice - the institutional raft - that allows persons to write and reason with all their discourses simultaneously. My work with mystory and chorography addresses this need. Where my work crosses with Bérubé’s is in the movement outside and across the borders currently dividing the compartments/discourses. Part of inventing the new practice includes the consultancy that must be created to educate the population moving into electracy. The assumption is that the sharp divisions separating laypersons from experts will diminish in electracy. The movements associated with <span class="lightEmphasis">direct democracy</span> are in principle the ones most relevant to the capacity of the new apparatus.</p>
<p>Specifically, the potential of the equipment/practice to support wholistic thinking in the sense defined in the popcycle - thinking that brings discipline knowledge into immediate intelligibility with the discourses of daily life - create the conditions of a new public sphere. In this scenario education and journalism come into direct competition; one or the other is likely to be vastly expanded at the expense of the other.</p>
<p>My own experience with the practicalities of the new consultancy is limited to a few trial projects conducted with the Florida Research Ensemble. I have described a specific project in some detail in a catalog essay that is available online, either on my homepage, or in <span class="journaltitle">PMC</span> (in a somewhat shorter version). The new consultancy locates that part of a given institutional practice that involves learning in any form relevant to that institution. Our pilot effort addressed tourism and the goal was to design a series of monuments and their related sites as tourist destinations that would support the wholistic thinking we say is a feature of electracy. The sites are to be hybrids integrating all the entertainment features of tourism with all the knowledge critical theory possesses about the formation of national identity. A vacation visit to the site would result in an immediate direct insight into the symbolic and ideological effects and consequences of one’s individual behavior at a collective level.</p>
<p>The FRE got as far as the conceptual design of several monuments, and the presentation of these ideas to several members of local economic planning councils, chambers of commerce, and the like. These individuals were enthusiastic about the potential of our designs - if actually built - to attract more tourists to our area.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">end of official commentary</span></p>
<p>———–<br />
Date: Sat, 10 Feb 1996 15:51:26 -0600 (CST)<br />
From: Joseph Tabbi<br />
To: greg ulmer<br />
Subject: Re: interviewriting</p>
<p>Greg,<br />
Good to hear from you! My own silence, these past several days, has been largely due to the work of organizing <span class="journaltitle">ebr2</span>. All but one or two of the Sellout responses have arrived, and it’s taken me some time getting them marked up and ready for Web distribution. Eventually, I’d like to have a set publication schedule that will allow me and a small staff to take care of technical matters without thinking about them (like playing music); at this still early stage, though, I’m figuring each thing out as I go.</p>
<p>So there’s a weird rhythm in this online mode of interviewing, where days go by before we hear from one another: You have a holiday visit from your mother in Montana; I have other matters to attend to at <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>; a system goes down at one end and, when it comes back up, we’ve gotten ahead of each other. We don’t “converse” - I’ve never met you or spoken to you, and I would not recognize your voice if you called me on the phone. We’ve scarcely exploited the medium’s capacities for real-time exchange. Our respective notes to one another are more like interruptions of ongoing activities elsewhere. In my case, the interruptions are helping me to think through what I’ve been doing all along: organizing the Sellout issue, or (more generally) trying to establish review policies and a protocol appropriate to online editing.</p>
<p>I’m actually finding the pace of our eterview to be congenial - closer to the speed at which I would compose an essay rather than conduct a conversation. (I myself never seriously thought of occupying a “public” role for much the same reason that I chose academia over journalism: I write slowly.)</p>
<p>What we seem to be settling on - and I’m not sure whether we’re misusing the medium or discovering its hidden possibility - is a mode of conducting interviews in which both parties are *writing*. We could hardly be said to be “communicating,” and I take this (in the spirit of your earlier remarks) to be a good thing, more or less. Refreshingly, you seem to have as little interest in answering a direct question as I have in asking one. (My heart was not really in it, I confess, when I proposed a series of rapid-fire questions in my last post.) There are still a few things left I’d like to know. For the most part, though, I’ll stick to this mode of interviewriting, and continue to think with you in the margins of your books and alongside your formal response to Bérubé.</p>
<p>More in a moment,</p>
<p>Joe<br />
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 1996 17:07:04 -0500 (EST)<br />
From: Greg Ulmer<br />
To: Joseph Tabbi<br />
Subject: Re: interviewriting</p>
<p>Hi Joe<br />
good reflections on the odd pace of electronic gifts In my classes we purposely explore how to let the different speeds of the different tools support one another: web page is most deliberate (but still open to change, unlike the fixity of print). email in the middle, with regular give and take; MOO interactive in real time, improvised (although the improvisations may take place in more fixed *digs*). Alignment and tuning may take place later,eventually…<br />
best<br />
Greg ———–</p>
<h2>question 2: systems alignments</h2>
<p><span class="emphasis">[jt]</span> I’m reading your most recent installments with interest and increasing illumination. In a way, you seem to be playing Lyotard to Bérubé’s Habermas: you are less confident than Bérubé in the efficacy of rationalist problem solving, because you would rather not engage the bureaucratic, administered culture on its own terms (even to reform it). You conceive of the intellectual’s public role as something grounded in local action, a consultancy that speaks (not to “power” directly, but) to individuals in and outside the academic system. Your “public” intellectual fits neither of Edward Said’s categories: S/he is neither a priest standing outside the culture nor a spokesman for marginalized factions, who would “speak to power” without colluding in it.</p>
<p>If these are fair descriptions of your differences from current models of left intellectual work, is there a disciplinary field that you would align yourself with more fully? Possibly systems theory, which circulates through much of Lyotard and is (I’d venture) an under-recognized element in Derrida’s thought (see, for example, Christopher Johnson’s <span class="booktitle">System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida</span>). Would you be willing to align grammatology with any of the work going on now in systems theory?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[glue]</span> The original draft of <span class="booktitle">Applied Grammatology</span> included a chapter on cognitive psychology and systems theory. I threw it out because I realized those approaches were too rationalist, too tied to the traditions of the philosophies of consciousness in their epistemologies, to be useful for post-pedagogy. General Systems theory has much in common with structuralism: very useful, but in need of the post.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[jt]</span> I ask you to situate yourself v-v systems theory because, like you, its recent proponents try to create terms for practical action without falling back on technocratic habits and assumptions. Cary Wolfe (one of the contributors to the Sellout forum) and William Rasch have recently characterized systems theory as an alternative to the “representationalist” habits and assumptions that have traditionally supported social and political theory (including those “representations of the intellectual” examined by Said and Bérubé). Critiques of enlightenment rationality, realism, and positivism, have removed the ground from theory, and with the collapse of the representationalist framework, left-liberal academics have lost confidence in theory’s ability to inform cultural “practice” in any direct way, on any but a “local” scale. Still, Wolfe and Rasch argue, the “loss” can be converted to a political gain, if the Left (or the Right, for that matter) can <span class="lightEmphasis">enlarge</span> the frame of reference. “Local” needn’t mean that one simply <span class="lightEmphasis">shrinks the field of representation</span>, so that one ends up being able to speak only for oneself, in the interests of one’s particular class, race, gender, or professional identity. Rather than falling back on defensive self-representations (the fragmented “identity politics” that cripples the Left nowadays), people hoping to be effective politically need to break the habit of representation altogether, reconsider the terms of their own local affiliations, and decide how best to interact with institutions in one’s vicinity and outside the usual orbit of one’s familiar discourse.</p>
<p>I understand your conception of an electronic consultancy as a way of institutionalizing a disciplinary practice between discourse systems, beginning with the circulation of signs among the four systems of what you call the Popcycle: discipline, school, family, entertainment. To be honest, these are four nets that I’d just as soon fly past. You, yourself, in “The Miranda Warnings: An Experiment in Hyperrhetoric,” intuit something slightly different from any of the institutional networks that contain you: a concept of “justice” (347). When you propose the term “justice,” you don’t ask that it be made a <span class="lightEmphasis">part</span> of the institutional network; justice is rather something that you <span class="lightEmphasis">intuit</span> from within the constraints of school, entertainment, family, discipline. Justice, then, is not something that can be fixed rationally; it is, and (if it is to be effective) it must remain, <span class="lightEmphasis">unconscious</span>. Hmm…</p>
<p>Perhaps one thing that your work offers (which systems theory does not) is a thoroughgoing consideration of the role played by the unconscious in our experience of institutions and discursive systems of various sorts. As I understand it, for you the unconscious is not an impersonal ideological formation that keeps us in thrall to institutions (as in Jameson’s “political unconscious”); rather, it is a field of private correspondences that should be explored and expanded for its own sake, as a way of discovering one’s own narrative (my-story) in institutions, in history, even in the frivolities of chance. Put another way, one could say that the mystory doesn’t come from within the self; it discovers itself in the various texts that compose it.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[glue]</span> My notion of the <span class="lightEmphasis">unconscious</span> is actually not that much different from Jameson’s political unconscious. That is, my understanding of this notion comes from the whole postructuralist account of the Symbolic Order (the mental internalization of Institutional discourse). Such a notion displaces any hard binary between public and private. At the same time, the grammatological frame suggests that the social and utopian desire that has contributed to the invention of computing has to do with the need for a tool capable of supporting the unconscious. The internetcomputer is the prosthesis of the unconscious (allows individuals and collectivities to write as well as be written by the unconscious).</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[jt]</span> So the unconscious becomes a psychological formation associated with writing and especially with print literacy; but now the “ghost” is leaving the body and going into the machine. It’s my understanding that your recent presentations (which I haven’t observed first-hand) take this style of reasoning further, offering a “logic of the jump” more appropriate to the new electronic literacy, or the electracy. Here’s what one participant wrote about your presentation (should I call it a performance?) at the Harvard English Institute:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">[Ulmer] says he has made a personal commitment to following the jumps wherever they lead - that is, whenever he has an intuitive sense that he ought to go to B or R or Z from A, he does, without worrying about whether it makes (logical) sense. In his presentation, he enacted this technique as well as talked about it, going from slide guitar and Hank Williams to Carmen Miranda (a la his piece in Landow), to Kubla Khan and why he, Ulmer, in Florida, is destined to link up with Coleridge. Most folks there were scratching their heads, as you can imagine. Not quite the sort of stuff the English Institute is used to. (N. Katherine Hayles; post to the UCLA NEH seminar, September 1995)</p>
<p>Reading this description suggests to me all kinds of things about the role of intuition in moving across, moving around in, and possibly keeping clear of, institutional systems and discursive boundaries. Could you say something about how you arrived at this anti-method (a systematic non-system) of presenting your ideas?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[glue]</span> <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span> helped me understand the need for counter-intuitive thinking (Feyerabend). The place of CONTRAST in the CATT is essential to recognize the contribution of existing normative ideas to innovation or thinking differently. <span class="booktitle">Heuretics</span> starts on the path of imagining post-method - thinking in which the procedures of PROBLEM SOLVING, interrogation, detective semiosis, narrative hermeneutics, are in the position of CONTRAST. They still play a guiding role, in the form of <span class="lightEmphasis">do not thus</span>. The chorographer cannot help but start within a narrative hermeneutics, knowing all along that what must be found is the magic gift, the place to operate the heuretic code that jumps out of INVESTIGATION. So far, no heuretics without hermeneutics, but… Such is the deconstructive aspect of heuretics (including a CONTRAST).</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[jt]</span> How - and to whom - does one present the results of such investigations? Is it your intention to circumvent scholarly modes of “publication” altogether? Your reputation, after all, what gives you the freedom to pursue such experiments, emerged as a result of academic book-writing. Will the book have a place in what you’re working on now?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[glue]</span> I have been puzzling over what to do with all the research I have done since <span class="booktitle">Heuretics</span>. The theories of choragraphy formulated there have proven very productive in my experiments, some of which have found their way into course design. I decided recently that my top priority is a textbook aimed at couching choragraphy in the most accessible way possible as a basic rhetoric for electracy. Many folks coming through Gainesville to check out our wonderful computing facilities have spoken with me about what place if any a book has in relation to the new media. My word to them has been: <span class="lightEmphasis">NoseRom</span> (an electronic alternative to the handbook). There is still a place for the book proper in the mix, and I would like to write one.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, there is the project for Creating an Electronic Community I mentioned - the local initiative to get the different levels of schooling collaborating in this new dimension (online), with a new function (invention). The slow pace of development of this consultation is frustrating but reflects the nature of collective processes.</p>
<p>This collective dimension of the apparatus has been important to several of my online projects. Last fall I gave a talk in Hamburg, Germany, at a conference called Interface 3. In collaboration with the Telematic Work Group (Hamburg based art students) I developed a net experiment called Show Your Fetish. I also taught a course that invented fetishturgy as a poetics of homepage design. This work will continue in my graduate seminar next fall, and in further collaborations with the Telematic Work Group. I have brainstormed these ideas in the slow-paced modest listserv that I moderate (which you should join!). Invent-L. Post to <a href="mailto:LISTSERV@NERVM.NERDC.UFL.EDU">LISTSERV@NERVM.NERDC.UFL.EDU</a> saying SUBSCRIBE INVENT-L.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[jt]</span> I will.</p>
<h2>question 3: action</h2>
<p><span class="emphasis">[jt]</span> You write: “Everything happens through institutions,” and “politics begins within one’s own institutions.” I can accept this. One reason I wanted to discuss Bérubé’s piece with you was so that we might extend the sellout theme to the institution that affects your work and mine most directly - namely, the Internet itself. In the long run, the political fights of today may prove to be “rearguard skirmishes,” as you say. Yet they’re bound to have real effects on the speed with which we evolve toward an electracy, and on the human pain and further cultural dislocation that such evolution must entail. One would like to think that the transition could be made in such a way that certain ideals of the old print order - freedom of expression, public access to online information, justice, even good old bourgeois privacy - could be preserved in the process.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[glue]</span> I don’t want to say too much about left intellectuals, except to recommend Sloterdijk’s <span class="booktitle">Critique of Cynical Reason</span>. The left intellectual is by definition bourgeois. The fate of the intellectual in revolutionary politics is either to be rounded up and massacred, or put to work in the service of a propaganda machine. The model of power relations in society assumed by <span class="booktitle">Critique</span> has been brought into question, for example in the writings by Foucault among others. The questioning of the grand metanarratives of emancipation, of <span class="lightEmphasis">resistance</span>, now emerge as of a piece with the other features of the apparatus of literacy, including subjectivation in the form of individual autonomous selfhood.</p>
<p>It is extremely difficult to suspend our belief in selfhood, which is the corollary of problem-solving. The project of grammatology, however, is to attempt an assessment of <span class="lightEmphasis">what is to be done</span> as thoroughly as possible in the terms given by the apparatus frame.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[jt]</span> But what sort of apparatus will we be given? How do you feel about the cybernetic hygiene passed into law four days ago? Even if the Decency Act turns out to be unenforcible (given the difficulties of controlling international traffic, for example), there are other elements in the telecommunications bill that will surely affect the long-term construction of any electronic apparatus. As <a class="outbound" href="http://www.wired.com"><span class="journaltitle">Wired</span></a> section editor Todd Lappin writes (in this week’s <span class="journaltitle">Nation</span>): “Lost in the shuffle has been any meaningful discussion of the concentration of mainstream media power, not to mention the idea of universal access to online resources - both of which amount to censorship of another type altogether.”</p>
<p>Such considerations, I think, should be of concern to scholars as well as net activists. The completion of a truly world wide web - perhaps the quintessential embodiment of corporate capitalism - also has a great potential for cultural homogenization. And even if such electronic domains are not capable of being policed, they certainly threaten any residual autonomy we might once have derived from the culture of print literacy. Do you regard this prospect (of total connectivity) as merely the persistence of the print apparatus, with its “total compartmentalization, sequestration, segregation, disjunction into analytical atoms of every domain of practice.” Is it not conceivable that print itself, and the culture of literacy, might function as a pocket of resistance to cultural homogenization - with the literary book gaining value precisely as a thing apart, a medium whose semi-autonomy can withstand even the digitalization of text? And if that’s mere romanticism or wishful thinking on my part, what forms of resistance to networked sameness do you see emerging <span class="lightEmphasis">within</span> the WWW?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[glue]</span> In grammatological terms the web is not a site of homogenization in a bad sense, nor is there any need for <span class="lightEmphasis">resistance</span> (that model of power is irrelevant to what is happening). The web has the potential to be to a global socio-political formation what print literacy (literature and journalism) were to the Nation-State (viz B. Anderson). My current web work involves the invention of cyberpidgin: a new vernacular syncretic discourse supportive of collective organization across the boundaries of different civilizations (Western/Other). I have lectured and published a bit on this project, and started some internet versions of it. At this point I have suggested that at this crude early cyberpidgin consists American popular culture of the 1950s plus a constellation of States of Mind (Mood Atmospheres) from a number of Non-European civilizations. <span class="lightEmphasis">Justice</span>, for example (as in “The Miranda Warnings”). Obviously this is not something that one person may do…. Nor is it at all clear what sort of post-national organization might emerge, if any. Grammatology is not a totalizing or totalizable world view. Rather, it says to me locally in my own circumstances: what is needed in the conditions coming into formation is a discourse practice capable of supporting dialogue across the differences of a postcolonial global world.</p>
<p>Popcycle: It will do itself. The theory indicates that the consultant puts this gift in circulation without expectation of return.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[jt]</span> But even a grammatologist has to make a living! I’ve been pressing you about the difficulties that grammatology has had in establishing itself as an institutional practice <span class="lightEmphasis">outside</span> of English departments. I have been thinking of a passage early in <span class="booktitle">Applied Grammatology</span>, where you cite Derrida on the need to establish a new “discipline” in order to do the work of grammatology (11). Derrida points to psychoanalysis as an example of an extra-academic discipline that institutionalized a new domain of knowledge (the “science of Freud’s name”). This was in the late sixties, when it was not yet clear where (or if) deconstruction would find its institutional accommodations. Could you speculate as to why, in the time since, grammatology has failed to create a space for work outside of academic institutions? Can you recognize any functioning models (since psychoanalysis itself has been under more or less vicious attack these days from all sides) that might be of use in establishing an electronic disciplinary structure? A space outside of the university (and preferably not at Microsoft, either) wherein an intellectual can actually <span class="lightEmphasis">practice</span> the new electronic arts, and perhaps make an independent living doing the sort of consultant-work you’ve set out in a number of posts?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">[glue]</span> I have no wisdom to offer about making a living…The matter of the institutionalization of the new apparatus involves in principle an economic dimension of spectacular proportions. I am thinking of the invention of <span class="lightEmphasis">school</span> by Plato as the institutionalization of alphabetic writing. I expect that <span class="lightEmphasis">school</span> in its current configuration and social function is not adequate to the potential of electronic technology (any more than is entertainment). Economics may be the site of the greatest crisis of invention we face. One dynamic is the commodification of everything (why not including grammatology?). At the same time, the link between job and income resources seems to be weakening.</p>
<p>When I was young, after doing some traveling, testing the bohemian thing a bit, I concluded that the university was the only institution within bourgeois civilization that offered any freedom of thought. My expectation was simply to disappear into the opaque veils of higher learning and survive. Much more could be said on this question. I will just add that I started my really serious work AFTER tenure, both because I was not far enough along in my understanding to do it any sooner and because I no longer had to worry about whether or not it got published. My books on grammatology have been experiments. I do what the theories suggest is possible. That you and others find the work relevant and productive is evidence of some kind that our academic practices still live, have some life in them (others might draw a different conclusion). So I appreciate your interest and I have enjoyed our exchanges. I look forward to our continuing collaboration.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/tabbi">tabbi</a>, <a href="/tags/ulmer">ulmer</a>, <a href="/tags/derrida">derrida</a>, <a href="/tags/berube">berube</a>, <a href="/tags/email">email</a>, <a href="/tags/interview">interview</a>, <a href="/tags/victor-vitanza">Victor Vitanza</a>, <a href="/tags/byteracy">byteracy</a>, <a href="/tags/berube">berube</a>, <a href="/tags/selling-out">selling out</a>, <a href="/tags/choragraphy">choragraphy</a>, <a href="/tags/electronic-rhetoric">electronic rhetoric</a>, <a href="/tags/john-cage">john cage</a>, <a href="/tags/grammatology">grammatology</a>, <a href="/tags/teletheory">teletheory</a>, <a href="/tags/benedict-anderson">Benedict Anderson</a>, <a href="/tags/popcycle">popcycle</a>, <a href="/tags/globalizaton">globalizaton</a>, <a href="/tags/internet">internet</a>, <a href="/tags/epistemology">epistemology</a>, <a href="/tags/systems-theory">systems theory</a>, <a href="/tags/mar">mar</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator910 at http://electronicbookreview.comThe Florida Research Ensemble and the Prospects for an Electronic Humanitieshttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/sociopsychological
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Greg Ulmer</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-11-11</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In works such as <span class="booktitle">Applied Grammatology</span>, <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Heuretics</span>, Gregory Ulmer has rigorously advocated a shift from critical interpretation of culture to theoretically-charged cultural invention. His articulation of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theories informs not merely a composite system of textual criticism but an expansive method of artistic creation. Ulmer’s theories of invention have vitalized his collaboration with the Florida Research Ensemble, a diverse group of artists and scholars who have worked for over ten years to counter the instrumentalist tendencies of new media. Instead of suggesting immediate ways to fix social problems, the FRE attempts to describe the psychological undercurrents of those problems through experimental text and interactive imagery. The Internet, which represents the FRE’s fundamental research area, serves both as the circulator of sublimated cultural drives and the medium for rendering those drives accessible to critical intervention. As a “prosthesis for a cultural unconscious,” the Internet according to Ulmer disseminates, even as it helps to construct, the desires of its users. It influences and is influenced by the evolution of cultural ideas as they travel through the “popcycle” - Ulmer’s term for the interplay of family, school, entertainment, and labor. Just as the popcycle fosters comforting illusions of personal liberation within free market society, so the Internet reproduces such costly “freedoms” at speeds hitherto unknown. Yet by raising deep-seated psychological drives to conscious awareness through the visual apparatus of the Web, the FRE formulates a potential mode of resistance. In uncovering the “repressed” of net-surfing culture, the Ensemble makes unspoken consumerist values available to deconstructive analysis.</p>
<p>Subjectivity, according to Antonio Negri in his “Twenty Theses on Marx,” is itself deconstructive. “Auto-valorization and sabotage are the double figure of one and the same subject,” he writes, “or better, they are the two faces of Janus, the gateway to the constitution of the subject” (160). Ulmer, while recognizing the capacity of capital to absorb the work of its critics, implicitly endorses Negri’s conjecture by locating the potential for subversion in creative (mis)uses of capital’s own advanced technologies of communication. Less militant than Negri but more self-consciously artistic, Ulmer attempts to undermine practices of domination by first theorizing, and then visually dramatizing, the repressions on which they are structured.</p>
<p>This process of sociopsychological demystification uncovers the possibility of alternative cultural logics. The FRE’s highly collaborative version of deconstructive subjectivity suggests new ways of collective being, ways that interlink various worldviews and disciplines in opposition to the laws of profit. The multidisciplinary Ensemble at once illustrates the corruption of the social interior and argues the insufficiency of solely personal change. Social healing requires collective critical action and long-term dedication. Without either the strength and diversity of numbers or the commitment to extended struggle, counterpower will be continually reabsorbed by capital. The work of the FRE is itself threatened by such absorption. Deeply sedimented cultural convictions persist even in the face of exposure, as conservative Web-users work to assimilate all contrary energies to their own sensibilities. Web-based forms of resistance either become commodified themselves or inadvertently prompt increasingly sophisticated technologies of oppression.</p>
<p>Yet the FRE represents the politics of hope, insisting that practices of poststructural psychoanalysis are constructive of new social arrangements as much as critical of existing ones. Insurgencies are often not fully contained by the regimes that spark them, and their dissident excesses suggest the “beyond” of the contemporary political economy. Deconstructive subjectivity, explains Negri, both destroys and reconstructs. As the FRE works to speed the destruction of instrumentalist approaches to technology, it contributes to the reconstruction of an Internet that privileges cooperative invention to commodity transfer. It is through such invention that the FRE aims to foster social health.</p>
<p>As a cultural theorist, Ulmer contends that conventional forms of social communication only partly realize the signification potential of the Internet, and he consequently fashions a counter-language that is at once graphical, parodic, and surreal. That counter-language informs the work of Ulmer’s “emerAgency,” a virtual consultancy that addresses cultural emergencies as effects of common psychological repressions. Whether considering the crises of Florida tourism in the early 1990s or the alarming number of national traffic fatalities, the emerAgency works less to offer solutions than to describe how the problems themselves suggest the interwoven and unconscious drives toward pleasure and death. Agency members describe such drives by means of image-intensive hypertexts that they collectively publish to the World Wide Web. The websites illustrate and interlink both the social allure and the terrors of established industries. Such sites depict no vacationing freedom without personal danger, no freeway flying without fatal collisions. As Ulmer himself explains, “No attraction without repulsion.”</p>
<p>In suggesting that unconscious repulsion intensifies rather than undermines desire, the emerAgency complicates enormously the process of social healing. Problems resist instrumental fixes because we misrecognize the impulses behind them. By more carefully theorizing those impulses, the FRE makes possible not a rapid exorcism but a critical awareness of the underside of desire. Such awareness can potentially lead to renewed ways of acting and interacting, new social policies, and more sophisticated approaches to the cultural “emergency.” The FRE’s psychoanalytic method supplements but does not displace the instrumentalist tactics of more conventional consultancies. As a “supplement” it reveals the incompleteness of those consultancies. The FRE’s cultural work, enriched by a highly graphical language and intricate theoretical rationale, provides subtlety and indirection where instrumentalism fails.</p>
<p>The cultural faith in quick-fix prescriptions suits capital’s need to efficiently conceal its emergent difficulties. Since the FRE seeks to reconceptualize problems rather than cover them over, it runs counter to dominant forms of consulting while diverging from prevalent modes of Internet communication. The very unorthodoxy of the emerAgency informs an indirect critique of conventional consultancy, while simultaneously opening a space for resistant practices of invention. In Ulmer’s vocabulary, this is the space of “heuretics.” As described in his text of the same name, heuretics</p>
<p class="longQuotation">contributes to what Barthes refers to as the “return of the poetician” - one who is concerned with how a work is made. This concern does not stop with analysis or comparative scholarship but conducts such scholarship in preparation for the design of a rhetoric/poetics leading to the production of new work. (4)</p>
<p>In the following interview, Ulmer describes how the FRE’s emerAgency incorporates heuretics into Web-based discourse. His attention to the consumerist tendencies of popular culture helps the FRE form a poetics that is at once oppositional and generative. While matching the anti-instrumentalism of such radical theorists as Herbert Marcuse (<span class="booktitle">One-Dimensional Man</span>) and Herbert Schiller (<span class="booktitle">Culture, Inc.</span>), Ulmer contributes to the development of a social ethic based on non-hierarchical collaboration, image-based reason, and non-Western alternatives to binary systems of thought. In the interview, as in his work with the FRE, Ulmer evades the strict scheme of problem and solution, opting instead for a serial meditation on the internet’s potential to map the terrain of cultural “psychogeography.”</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Carter:</span> Greg, I’d like to discuss your participation in the Florida Research Ensemble’s Web-based “Imaging Florida” project. In an online essay about that project called “Metaphoric Rocks: A Psychogeography of Tourism and Monumentality,” you suggest that the FRE’s advocation of an inventive, electronically-interactive experience of Florida represents an important alternative to forms of tourism based on mere observation and consumption. Linking the FRE’s promotion of creative and participatory tourism to the Greek philosopher Solon’s notion of travel as theoretical endeavor, you argue for Florida “solonism” as a means of continually re-imagining the state’s cultural identity. Why have you and the FRE chosen the Internet as a forum for posing solonism against more highly commercialized forms of tourism? In light of the Web’s uncommon facilitation of commercialism, the “Imaging Florida” project seems significantly non-conformist both in its deployment of Web technology and its alternative conception of travel. What might the relationships be between the solonism proffered by “Imaging Florida” and practices of Internet engagement?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Ulmer:</span> What I enjoy about e-mail interviews is their “serial” nature. Your question initiates a certain direction in our dialogue, and my reply will not be complete or final. I will start to answer the question, but in an improvisatory and partial way. I don’t like posts that are too long, even if they will be strung together into an “essay” eventually. The rhythm of the series will be one of more or less shorter installments, following an associative curve that may or may not constitute an “answer.” It may take me several posts to answer one question, nor do you need to wait but should feel free to add further questions or requests for clarification, in a sense attempting to direct or redirect the series.</p>
<p>I will start by providing some context. The Florida Research Ensemble (FRE) orginated at the University of Florida in the late 1980s as a group of colleagues with a common interest in electronic media. Current charter members include myself and William Tilson, a professor of Architecture. Also active are Barbara Jo Revelle (a creative photographer) and Will Pappenheimer (videographer), both in the Fine Arts Department. I am the theorist for the group. Simon Penny (now at Carnegie Mellon) was a charter member, and John Craig Freeman was our digital artist until he moved to the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Not that one must be at/in Florida to work with the FRE. Craig has applied the FRE agenda to his new setting, and we have “affiliations” with colleagues at several locales in the U.S. and abroad.</p>
<p>Forming the FRE grew out of dissatisfaction with the old “reading group” approach to collaboration. I had always participated in one reading group or another, organized around theory. The practice is familiar: an interdisciplinary group of scholars would agree on a list of books, usually works of French theory, and we would meet regularly to discuss and argue. I learned a great deal from these sessions, and if anything they died of their own success, in that the groups tended to become too large. The chief source of dissatisfaction, however, was the homogeneity of the group. There was plenty of disagreement at the meetings, but finally we all were scholar-critics, each working individually on our separate books.</p>
<p>The FRE gave me an opportunity to shift from talk to action, or rather from argument to production, and from individual to collaborative work. Our organizational principle is not that of the reading group but of a “creative team,” with each member bringing a different specialized talent to the table. Each of us knows something about the others’ areas of expertise, enough to facilitate communication. The “ensemble” structure means that there is no hierarchy; we work by consensus. Our meetings are motivated by cooperative work on specific projects addressing a fundamental research problem. The products or fruits of the process (whether undertaken individually or as a group) take many forms: article, interview, exhibition, conference talk, video tape, CD-Rom, website, university course, grant application. The name of our research problem may be defined in a word - the Internet.</p>
<p>An important feature of the Internet is the potential connection it creates across all existing institutions and discourses. There is already a flow or circulation of ideas and “memes” through the “popcycle” of modern institutions - Family, School, Entertainment, Work (specialized expertise). I might have more to say about this popcycle later. For now the point is that the Internet potentially is a prosthesis for augmenting and raising to self-consciousness this circulation, which in heuretic terms is the key to the creativity of a society. The FRE goal is to develop a practice - a rhetoric - to realize this potential.</p>
<p>One lesson of the avant-garde and experimental arts, especially the lesson of its failures, is that it is not enough to invent new forms. Forms must be part of institutional discourses in order to survive and become functional. The FRE approach to inventing a practice for the Internet, then, is deconstructive: we enter into the process of invention (heuretics) by intervening in an existing institution. Keeping in mind that the Internet itself is an institution (meaning that it has an infrastructure with administrative entities managing sets of laws and codes), we chose consulting as our deconstructive vehicle, since it already is a principal means by which expertise created within the academy is delivered to sites of need in other institutions such as government and business. Our entry into consulting began with a project in my graduate seminar to establish a virtual consultancy - the emerAgency.</p>
<p>The emerAgency is influenced by systems art and conceptual art and their experiments that considered social and cultural processes in aesthetic terms, eliminating the barriers separating art forms from political and ethical realities. The single most important example of such art is the Free International University created by Joseph Beuys, which included among its activities a proposal to the European Union for attempting an artistic solution to the troubles in Ireland. This example of course exists in a context of arts efforts throughout the twentieth century to bring art out of the museum institution and reintegrate it as a practical part of everyday life. The FRE continues this effort, based on our understanding of digital technology, which is that the aesthetic and emotional powers of the arts are fundamental to the “skill sets” of electracy.</p>
<p>I need to go into more detail about how the emerAgency actually works. In the immediate context I’ll just note that the justification for a “virtual” consultancy, related to this systems and conceptual heritage, is that in a post-industrial information economy, we are in a condition of “speed” (Virilio). Ideas circulate freely apart from objects, without grounding necessarily in conventional “firms” and “agencies.” Information on the Internet has gone off the “gold standard” of literate proof. Or to use another historical (grammatological) analogy, we are in a moment similar to the one in the history of the alphabet when it was realized that the letters could circulate without being attached as labels to objects. In short, the Internet is profoundly rhetorical in nature, operating on a multi-valued logic that includes not only the true and the false but also the secret and the lie. Or, to put it another way, the Internet is the prosthesis for that part of thought, mind, intelligence, that has been theorized in terms of the “unconscious.” Poststructural psychoanalysis provides a readymade rhetoric-poetics for an image-based reason.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Carter:</span> Whether favoring the FRE’s collaborative invention to traditional reading groups or preferring Joseph Beuys’s social activism to museum display, you clearly value the material consequences of theoretical endeavor. The heuretics of the FRE, for example, suggest attempted interventions in the material practices of Florida tourism and in the production of cultural identities. I’m excited by the Ensemble’s recommendations that state visitors seek out the abject and forgotten spaces within the landscape, explore those spaces’ relationships to larger social failures, and imagine ways to heal both cultural and environmental wounds. Like Beuys, Florida “solonists” (creative philosopher-travelers) can begin to acknowledge previously repressed wounds and treat them with what you have called “the aesthetic and emotional powers of the arts.” How might working to transform the psychogeography of Florida through artistic intervention suggest an approach to Web travel? Furthermore, if the Web is the “prosthesis” for a cultural unconscious, what practical bearing might poststructuralist psychoanalysis have on the informatics of resistance?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Ulmer:</span> At the time of the formation of the emerAgency the crisis facing the State of Florida concerned tourism. The State government hired various advertising agencies as consultants to help repair the damage to the image of Florida caused by a string of murdered tourists, not to mention the “vice” image of Miami in general. The challenge for the FRE was to come up (uninvited) with a program that would be an Arts and Letters practical alternative or (more deconstructively) supplement to the conventional propaganda campaigns produced by the paid consultants. “Solonism” was the working term for this alternative: promoting a new dimension of tourism based on the ancient practice of “theoria.” Solon served as a “theoros” - one of a group of citizens sent to investigate places and events and report back to the State with an authoritative account. This group or theoria combined the functions of theory and tourism - a “high” or “critical” travel of a kind flexible enough to include everything from the journey of the Magi to find out the meaning of the star in the East to the wandering pilgrimages of Basho to the old shrines and legendary sites of Japan (the haiku in his journals have been compared to tourist snapshots). Solon is the one Plato credits (in <span class="booktitle">Timaeus</span>) with bringing back to Athens the story of Atlantis told to him by a priest in Egypt.</p>
<p>The general goal of Solonism is to introduce into conventional tourism certain features that raise awareness of the contribution that entertainment in general and tourism in particular make to the formation of national identity. There is a strong didactic element in many tourist sites as it is, that provide a point of departure for a deconstructive practice. Tourists moreover already use the Internet to gather information and make arrangements, and our program addresses real as well as virtual travel destinations. Indeed, the FRE’s first effort as a theoria was to propose to a county economic council an idea for a tourist attraction - a proposal for an electronic monument that could function not only conceptually but that literally was buildable. The planning councils in North Central Florida are always trying to figure out how to attract more visitors to their area, and we proposed that they construct a Florida extension of Mount Rushmore (a monument initiated as a way to attract tourists to the Black Hills). “Florida Rushmore” proposed to project a digitally generated hologram of a sixty-foot head (the Rushmore scale) into the Devil’s Millhopper sinkhole, a State Geological Preserve near Gainesville, Florida. Using the compositing software developed for finding missing children, and the mystorical design principles that I worked out in <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span> and <span class="booktitle">Heuretics</span>, the head displays the “superego” of a different visitor every fifteen minutes. This spectacular display is contextualized by a museum exhibit that records the history of tourism in a way that educates visitors about how a community creates and invents its identity.</p>
<p>Although the economic planning council was in fact intrigued by the proposal, saying that it would probably be a bigger draw than the Dakota version, we did not follow up. A model for the kind of local institutional political work needed to realize such a plan is available in the “wrapping” projects undertaken by Christo. Instead we spun out a series of proposals for an electronic monumentality, using a practice called the MEmorial. The psychogeographical theory informing the consultancy suggests that what Solonism should add to the tourist attraction is the tourist “repulsion.” No attraction without repulsion. Again, conventional tourism already frames as attractions certain kinds of places and events that might be considered “repulsive” - sites of crime and disaster for example. The MEmorial is an Internet asterisk placed on existing monuments and memorials. It may include a “peripheral” - an electronic device located at or near a monument that symbolically extends its functionality. The related Internet site develops this new dimension, which is to extend the acknowledgement of public mourning and commemoration to activities and behaviors of loss and destruction confined to the private sphere of individual one-at-a-time disasters. The first MEmorial addressed traffic fatalities by proposing to place a peripheral at the Vietnam Wall on the Mall in Washington D.C. (or at the scaled-down replica in Pensacola). The peripheral consists of a computer and printer, printing out the names of fatalities as they occur around the nation. The goal is to help visitors understand that the slaughter on the highways is a sacrifice on behalf of a fundamental if abject value. The ideal value of “freedom” is lived abjectly through the private automobile.</p>
<p>It is here that Solonism transforms into consulting. The psychogeographical theory suggests that the empirical, instrumental methods of conventional social and natural sciences are not adequate for comprehending the cultural and personal dimensions of public policy problems. Neither liberal theories of individual responsibility nor Marxist theories of social construction can account fully for the annual sacrifice of forty to fifty thousand dead on the roads. J. G. Ballard’s <span class="booktitle">Crash</span> (and the Cronenberg film) open up the further dimension of repulsion/attraction of the death/pleasure principle that informs emerAgency consulting. The instrumentalist object (the wrecked car) neglects the fact (in our theory) that the car or any object in a disaster is also “das Ding,” the Thing of the unconscious, or a fetish, the “little other” (“objet petite a” - Lacan) which is the car-in-me, the metaphysical car if you like, the extimate automobile of the death “drive” (to speak in a Freudian shorthand). To the extent that policy issues include not only objects of knowledge but also objects of desire, the Arts and Letters disciplines must be involved in any consideration of “solutions.” The MEmorial practice does not claim to have better knowledge than the instrumentalists. Rather, to make a MEmorial is to perform the emerAgency slogan: problems B us: it is to experience and bear witness to the reason why instrumental solutions frequently fail (or why their outcomes are often other than expected). The “pothole” is in me, in every citizen, and it is a pothole that no amount of blacktop can ever fill. Or, to be more optimistic about the educative prospects of Solonism, once there is a collective holistic grasping of the connections between the two kinds of objects, then the society may make new kinds of policies.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Carter:</span> The cultural attraction to the Internet resembles the attraction to the automobile in that both technologies support illusions of unfettered mobility and self-determination. The comfort provided by such illusions exacts a high price: thousands of people die on the highways, while thousands more experience and/or sanction varied forms of exploitation in online spaces. Though the high number of fatal car accidents should perhaps give rise to a critical awareness of our travel habits, we tend to repress the dangers in the interest of preserving the fantasy of personal freedom. On another level, it may be the repressed risks themselves that perpetuate our dependence on automobiles. Might the same be true for the Internet? If the net simultaneously feeds our desires for mobility and for the private indulgence of dangerous fantasies, its doubly powerful appeal perhaps accounts for the cultural tendency to downplay the social inequities pervading internetworked discourse. While some online spaces support the re-imagination of social relations, much webwriting serves to intensify the economic, racial, and sexual injustices that pre-existed the Web. As it works to widen the chasm between rich and poor, facilitates anonymous harassment, and further marginalizes groups who have limited electronic access, it magnifies deeply entrenched social problems. Problems B Us. In targeting the Internet as a research subject, does the FRE address its repulsive uses as well its attractive ones? Is every MEmorial, while an inventive look at cultural psychogeography, also a critique of Web-based instrumentalism? Do MEmorials exist that depict the Internet itself as a problem representative of its users?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Ulmer:</span> There are considerable risks and dangers as well as opportunities associated with the emergence of electracy. The grammatological analogy suggests that the institutional and identity formations that organize our society now - the democratic nation-state and individual selfhood - are relative to literacy. Not that they will disappear in electracy, any more than did the apparatus of orality within literacy (religion and the experience of spirit). The new technology is being institutionalized in the practices of Entertainment (within a capitalist economic model), which in turn is producing new experiences of identity and ultimately new kinds of behavior. We have to be able to imagine a society that commits itself to a mode of conduct that fully meets its needs for survival and happiness but that is unrelated to religion or science.</p>
<p>The question for educators is how best to respond to or participate in this paradigm shift. Critique is useful up to a point, as a means of analysis, but is fundamentally limited by its literate nature. As Walter Benjamin noted, it is not what the moving red neon sign says, but the fiery pool reflected in the pavement. His point was that advertising has replaced criticism as the discourse most effective in an era of an image apparatus. The reflexivity inherent in critique produced the insight that a text-based epistemology has only limited access to the image. The strategy of “resistance” must be considered in the context of the seemingly limitless capacity of capitalist entertainment forms to appropriate and commodify the countercultural and subcultural styles mounted against the society of the spectacle. It is not that “resistance is futile,” but that the Western preference for confrontation may have to be modified by non-Western alternatives, such as the Chinese traditions of indirection and manipulation, developed for non-democratic conditions. W. J. T. Mitchell’s <span class="booktitle">Picture Theory</span> is an important book for the way it marks the pictorial turn that has replaced the linguistic turn of twentieth-century theory. Digital imaging and the Internet are to electracy what alphabetic writing and the book/library were to literacy.</p>
<p>Grammatology adds to this pictorial turn the suggestion that the Internet is the prosthesis of the unconscious mind-body. The implication is that the repressed of the bourgeois worldview (the WASP hegemony, the Protestant spirit of capitalism) will return online. Fantasy is becoming self-conscious, an explicit element in our discourse, manifested in the sex and violence of popular culture. The goal of psychoanalysis, stated in the slogan “where Id was shall Ego be,” is being realized at a collective level in the new apparatus. This effect is dangerous of course but also an opportunity for a more sane civilization, depending on how we respond collectively to the possibility of being able to write the unconscious. As Giorgio Agamben says in <span class="booktitle">The Coming Community</span>, “advertising and pornography, which escort the commodity to the grave like hired mourners, are the unknowing midwives of this new body of humanity.”</p>
<p>A difference between virtual and actual travel, notable in this context, is that dreamwork, the omnipotence of thought, and the laws of magic are to a virtual reality what the laws of physics are to our material reality. It is time to take another look (as the arts were doing throughout the twentieth century) at the pre-scientific practices of oral civilizations as a resource for inventing electracy. That William Gibson, inventor of the term “cyberspace,” turned to Voodoo possession as a metaphor for post-human or cyborg experience of memory (in <span class="booktitle">Count Zero</span> and <span class="booktitle">Mona Lisa Overdrive</span>) is a sign of things to come. The key point here is that the new forms and practices will be hybrids, expressing a syncretism of the Judeo-Christian- Greco-Roman West with the Afro-Caribbean Black Atlantic. Hence, capitalist “possession” and Voodoo “possession” literalize what for Marx was only a metaphor: the commodity fetish. This literalization of a fetish economy in our rationalized secular lifeworld is similar to the conversion of Rome to Christianity. The consequences are not predictable. That there is reason for optimism, however, may be seen in the Ken Burns’ nineteen-hour documentary on Jazz currently showing on PBS. It remains to be seen what will come of the transfer of wealth to a few African-Americans (among others) currently taking place in the sports and music branches of Entertainment, equivalent to the moment of the robber barons (the Carnegies and Rockefellers). This perspective suggests that the problem of “access” cuts both ways. “If you don’t shake,” as the title of one of Buddy Bolden’s signature songs goes, “you don’t get no cake.”</p>
<p>This is where heuretics comes in, as an alternative to or supplement of hermeneutics. Heuretics uses theory to invent new practices and forms, as distinct from the hermeneutic use of theory to interpret existing works. The motto of educators, especially those charged with responsibility for literacy, should be the one Basho suggested for poets: the point is not to follow in the footsteps of the masters, but to seek what they sought. What Aristotle and the other inventors of literacy sought were the practices that made the technology of alphabetic writing useful and accessible to their community. Our responsibility is to do the same for electracy. “Accessibility” is a hot political and ethical issue. Again, the grammatological analogy reminds us of historical process. Like the Heraclitean river, the digital apparatus is different each time it is statistically sampled. The historical lesson is that access is relative and takes time, and must take into account the whole apparatus. Thus for example the technology of pen and paper is extremely accessible, but the institutional practices of reading and writing - the methods of logic, research, the essay and the like - are not so accessible. A pen costs less than a dollar but the community invests billions each year in the public schools that teach how to use the pen (with limited success). Meanwhile, over eighty-five percent of the public school districts in America are wired. The question now is the one Nietzsche posed: who will teach the teachers?</p>
<p>We do not yet have the practices of electrate discourse. Or rather, the materials of electrate rhetoric, logic, poetics, are dispersed throughout the history of Arts and Letters forms, but have yet to be integrated into an electrate equivalent of general literacy. A study such as Walter Ong’s <span class="booktitle">Literacy and Orality</span> indicates what to expect: electrate people will reason, tell stories, and make images, but they will do so in a way different from oral and literate peoples. The only determined aspect of this difference is the inevitability of the change. One way for educators to influence the change is by inventing and promoting the practices that adapt the purposes of learning (for expertise, citizenship, and self-knowledge) to the new apparatus.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Agamben, Giorgio. <span class="booktitle">The Coming Community</span>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.</p>
<p>Gibson, William. <span class="booktitle">Count Zero</span>. New York: Mass Market, 1986.</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">Mona Lisa Overdrive</span>. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1988.</p>
<p>Makdisi, Saree, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl, eds. <span class="booktitle">Marxism Beyond Marxism</span>. New York: Routledge, 1996.</p>
<p>Marcuse, Herbert. <span class="booktitle">One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society</span>. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.</p>
<p>Mitchell, W. J. T. <span class="booktitle">Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.</p>
<p>Ong, Walter. <span class="booktitle">Literacy and Orality: The Technologizing of the Word</span>. London: Methuen, 1982.</p>
<p>Schiller, Herbert. <span class="booktitle">Culture, Inc: The Corporate Takerover of Public Expression</span>. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.</p>
<p>Ulmer, Gregory. <span class="booktitle">Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">Heuretics: The Logic of Invention</span>. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994.</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video</span>. London: Routledge, 1989.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/gregory-ulmer">Gregory Ulmer</a>, <a href="/tags/applied-garmmatology">applied garmmatology</a>, <a href="/tags/teletheory">teletheory</a>, <a href="/tags/heuretics">heuretics</a>, <a href="/tags/florida-research-ensemble">Florida Research Ensemble</a>, <a href="/tags/fre">fre</a>, <a href="/tags/antonio-negri">antonio negri</a>, <a href="/tags/marxism">marxism</a>, <a href="/tags/cultural-theory">cultural theory</a>, <a href="/tags/roland-barthes">Roland Barthes</a>, <a href="/tags/herbert-marcuse">herbert marcuse</a>, <a href="/tags/solonism">solonism</a>, <a href="/tags/william-tilson">william tilson</a>, <a href="/tags/barbara-jo-revelle">barbara jo revelle</a>, <a href="/tags/will-pappenheimer">will pappenheimer</a>, <a href="/tags/simon-penny">simon penny</a>, <a href="/tags/internet">internet</a>, <a href="/tags/e">e</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator897 at http://electronicbookreview.com